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Intel Makes More Driver Improvements For Valve's L4D2

Phoronix: Intel Makes More Driver Improvements For Valve's L4D2

Developers at Intel's Open-Source Technology Center have made more improvements to their open-source Linux graphics driver to benefit Valve's upcoming release of their Left 4 Dead 2 game that's powered by the Source Engine natively on Linux...

Does Intel Ivy Bridge and Sandy Bridge run Source Engine games at good quality and good performance?

If so, then what would I need a AMD or Nvidia card for, and why would I want one?

You get borderline performance at average quality, at best. Think of it this way, it's about the same as your onboard AMD or NVIDIA graphics chip. You want a dedicated card for high resolution output, high quality settings. Intel Ivy/Sandy graphics don't support a lot of graphical features, and there is an obvious degraded image quality in using them that is really apparent once you compare them. At best, these driver enhancements are simply cutting corners to improve performance, Ivy Bridge especially uses a feature just for this.

Does Intel Ivy Bridge and Sandy Bridge run Source Engine games at good quality and good performance?

If so, then what would I need a AMD or Nvidia card for, and why would I want one?

No, they don't. Even if they did, Source engine is hardly cutting edge, and L4D2 is already 3 years old (and wasn't even close to cutting edge at the time it came out). If _all_ you care about is Source, then maybe the Intel GPUs will be passable. If you wanted to play a game with modern high-end graphics capabilities, like a theoretical Arkham City Linux port, you will find the very bestest Intel HD4000 Ivy Bridge GPU to not even handle a minimum 30 fps unless you set everything to absolute lowest quality and low resolution. Running in beautiful maximum quality 1080p w/ D3D11/GL4 features (and stereoscopic 3D even, if you're in to that crap) would be right out the window, while a Radeon HD 6870 can manage maximum settings at 1200p in D3D11 mode at 30 fps just fine, an NVIDIA GTX 680 can handle it at full 60 fps no problem, and a CrossFire/SLI system (including the "one card" dual-GPU solutions like the GTX 690 and presumably the 7990 when it's available) can handle maximum settings 1200p D3D11 mode with stereoscopic 3D, with room to breath (granted, you'll hear it breathing, because cards like that are loud as hell).

My apologies for this ignorant question, but what's the point? Intel isn't known for gaming, at least as far as I know. Nvidia and AMD are. Shouldn't the focus be on those two?

The Point is that intels main driver is the free one, and with the blob drivers from nvidia and amd any dedicated card that was sold in the last 5 years is fast enough for that source-engine games anyway, and if they optimise them a bit for that game we will not hear about that anyway...

and for intel its good to make here progress especialy for valve because 90% of all people have intel-gpus in use, and yes such low-end grafics games are also played on such systems. So at least for valve that makes very much sense. for Intel its a good example software to make their driver better in gerneral, if that game works better other software that uses 3d features will become faster, too.